The data processing platforms utilized by financial institutions to manage or otherwise process user accounts and associated information of transactions pertaining to these accounts have been developed over a number of years and may have a correspondingly long lifespan. These data processing systems may offer a certain range of functionality, however, in many cases these legacy systems are incompatible with one another. Consequently, at present, financial institutions are not easily or directly able to view data or conduct transactions between themselves, as different financial intuitions may utilize different types of data processing platforms. This limitation may severely limit the value financial institutions can create for their customers and may adversely impact their own operating efficiencies as well.
More specifically this limitation may prevent or hinder the ability of a financial institution to conduct transactions (e.g. viewing account information, moving funds between accounts, withdrawing or transferring funds from an account, etc.) in conjunction with other financial institutions. These types of transactions include bringing together a user's accounts from different financial institutions into a single view. Currently this capability is limited to screen capture-style inquiry only and may require the knowledge of a user's password at each individual financial institution at which a user holds an account. It would be extremely valuable for financial institutions to offer to their customers the ability to operate on all of their accounts from different institutions simultaneously and perform transactions between or among these accounts them. Additionally, when conducting a transaction at one financial institution with respect to an account at another financial institution such as the cashing of a check or the transfer of funds a financial institution can either hold the funds and wait for the funds to settle, which is inconvenient for the customer, or it can assume risk in making the funds available to the customer before it gets paid.
Incompatibility between host systems at financial institutions may also cause problems for the management of multiple financial institutions in tandem. For example, where a financial institution acquires another institution and thus needs some level of dual financial institution reporting and visibility the incompatibility of host systems at the respective financial institutions may be problematic.
Existing methods for conducting inter-financial institution transactions are severely limited in that they typically rely on manual modes of communication, such as telephone, to verify the existence of and availability of funds across institutions or they rely on screen scraping methods which provide only static, non-actionable data. Or temporary information that can change before the information is acted on, thus increasing risk to the financial institution. Additionally, manual settlement may be required in conjunction with these methods in order to reduce risk for the financial institution. This requirement may consequently reduce the intended benefit to the consumer and does not provide the financial institution or end users with a mechanism for executing transactions through online applications. Furthermore, these types of transactions may be limited in scope, such that only a highly specialized slice of financial data is reviewable, and that slice, as mentioned above, may be non-actionable.
Thus there is a need for efficient systems and methods for coordinating and conducting transactions between and among financial institutions.